Meantime – World Clock Watch

Meantime is a home-screen widget that shows where your people are and what time it is for each of them. Add up to five people by the town they live in, picked from an offline list of 34,000 towns, and the widget draws each one as a coloured dot on a map of the world, with the real night moving across it, and lists them under the map with their hour, the minutes ticking, and the place in your own words: Mom 11:27 AM Kalamazoo.

The map frames you and your people. A family spread between the American Midwest and Switzerland gets the North Atlantic; one in London, Geneva and Cape Town gets a tall map of Europe and Africa, and stretching the widget taller gives it more map. Or choose the whole world, a strip from Svalbard to Cape Horn with your home at the centre. State and province lines are drawn for the United States, Canada and Australia. Two styles: an old atlas, or dark.

Day, night and the twilight band are painted as they really fall at this minute, so you see at a glance whether it is daylight where Mom is. An hour bar across the top reads the hour along the map. Fine red slashes mark the part of the world already on tomorrow, or still on yesterday, with a +1d or -1d beside the midnight line, and a person on the other date carries the same mark beside their name. The date line follows its real bends around Kiribati, Samoa and Tonga.

Each person's hour comes from Android's own time-zone database, so it is right on the night the clocks change, in any year, wherever they live.

Settings, from a long press on the widget or from the app's icon:
• Home: your own town; guessed from the phone's time zone until you set it
• People: up to five, each a short name (Mom, Sis, HQ), a town found by typing, your own description of the place (Kalamazoo, Zurich office) and one of six colours
• Map: Fit my people, or Whole world, per widget
• Style: follow the phone, vintage atlas, or dark, per widget

The widget is four cells wide and two tall, and can be stretched taller. The map refreshes about every fifteen minutes; the clocks tick on their own in between.

Meantime works offline: no account, no network access, no location permission, no ads, and nothing leaves your phone. Your people's names and towns are stored on the phone only.

From the maker of the World Clock Watch faces for the Samsung Galaxy Watch; the map is the one drawn on the Meridian and Mercator faces. Coastlines from Natural Earth, public domain. Towns from GeoNames, CC BY 4.0.

Requires Android 8.0 or later. Tested on the Galaxy A52s. One-off purchase, no subscription.

Support: worldclockwatch@gmail.com